Weird Fiction

Lord Quagczar here, groggy, soggy and as grumpy as Gaia during the 6th extinction.

I spent yesterday evening below ground, percolating with the souls of pedestrians past.

An abandoned underground corridor was activated electronically and collective memories reawakened.

As this vestigial organ of the urban apparatus was re-animated with industrial strength images and sounds both diegetic and non-, I was reminded of just how foolish you humans are. The site of one rat is cause for alarm and shrieking, while you all wander quite contently in the smog that gets passed off as breathing-air here, once called India’s garden city.

Let this be a lesson you can’t learn: rat’s don’t kill; air pollution does. Too bad your puny human brains are not wired to understand this simple fact. You are always looking for faces in clouds rather than looking for clouds in faces. If you had any sense you’d all be running around shrieking in fear until the air was cleared and the non-linear climate dynamics of spaceship earth were brought back from the edge of chaos.

I guess you humans had a pretty good run with rationality and the scientific method, but you are gonna get blindsided by the limits of this line of inquiry. As my minion Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago: the usefulness of a map is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness.

To be honest I am looking forward to the completion of your tale, for then I will be released from my duties protecting the fecundity of your information ecosystem, and I can get on to more interesting work in other, nicer, galaxies.

Well….I guess I have to return to my duties of churning your data smog and info-toxins into anomalous ideas. Try to open your third eye every once in a while, or at least try to see your head without a mirror, it might open pathways out of the local optima of rational processes and linear and into unexplored areas of the problem space your collective mind needs to survive another generation or two.

Or not. The faster you die-off, the faster I can move on to galaxies that are a little more hospitable to beings of wisdom such as myself.

Hello weary home-bodies. It is I, lord Quagczar.

I have taken form here in the swamp lands south of the Indus river, overflowing with water, rot, waste and rebirth during this season of monsoons. I spend my days busily collecting glitch, and my nights roaming the nala, but pause to give you this prophecy and warning.

As an assigned protector of your cognitive diversity I am always on the lookout for future human situations caused by new speciations in the information ecosystem. What are these emergent bifurcations that set you apart, send you ahead or backwards and set you against each other?

Ruptures in the space time continuum are always an impetus for new forms of knowing, new ways of living, and, often with you humans, new forms of violence. You could minimize the damage-done in the quest for an extended sensing apparatus by using livingry, not weaponry as a driver. True, this would be slower, but it would allow you to practice the precautionary principle and would hurt less in the long run. Your body might be your temple, but not if you keep you crushing it with the weight of the commercially co-opted detritus from the military industrial complex. I find you humans a most violent and ignorant lot, and would be tempted to leave this planet or wipe you out completely if I wasn’t assigned your protectorate!

Now for my latest cautionary transmission: be careful what you look at. Learning to see can open up new doorways or damn you to blindness. Not everyone needs to see everything all the time, in fact this is a guaranteed recipe for electronic-snow-blindness, but drilling too far down in any one direction of the information ecosystem promises to end in skulls filled with poison gas and bleeding eyeballs. I find your burnt-brain meandrathal’s a tasty treat and humorous diversion, but too many casualties in the quest for knowledge means the end of both of us, so heed this telling with action.

Some information environmentalists claim that knowledge equity is an issue of access, pointing to the digital divide, but that argument is tied up in the tired narrative of progress and Western hegemony. Is not the ability to identify and speak to bird species lacking in the digerati? Perhaps instead of sending the tech-enabled social entrepreneurs to these lands abundant in info diversity we need to reverse source tribals armed with ecological narratives most peculiar to the mental-model-scarce untied states of america. I fear that not taking into account these non-normative and arrational narratives is creating some serious mental monocultures in the information ecosystems of planet earth.

You have been warned. Wisdomversify or die!